Cleve Jones

Cleve Jones (11 October 1954-) was an American gay rights activist.

Biography
Cleve Jones was born on 11 October 1954 in West Lafayette, Indiana, but he was raised in Scottsdale, Arizona. He was bullied in gym class in Arizona, and he came to San Francisco in the 1970s, where he met Harvey Milk. He initially refused to vote for Milk during his campaigns for city supervisor in 1974, believing that politics were a bourgeois affair; Jones instead headed to Spain, where he witnessed police use rubber bullets against people marching in Barcelona to remember the gays that died under dictator Francisco Franco. Jones was inspired by the gays when they began to fight back against the police, and he decided to become an intern under Milk upon his return to San Francisco. When Milk was killed in 1978, Jones decided to work for state assemblyman Art Agnos, and he came up with the idea of the AIDS memorial quilt during the 1980s. Jones would continue to be a gay and AIDS activist for years to come, and he became another face of the gay rights movement.